Microsoft vs. Northwest Schools Part III

SymphonicMan writes: "As previously discussed on Slashdot, Microsoft threatened an audit for the 24 largest school districts in the Northwest. Now it appears they may be backing down, according to Steve Duin, the Oregonian columnist who orginally brought this to all of our attention in April. Not only that, he writes that Portland Public Schools is opening 16 Linux computer labs across the districts, at half the cost of a Microsoft-equipped lab. Looks like this might be more than just a PR victory for open source. I'm a senior in one of the districts (Beaverton) included in the audit, and our staff is still going crazy trying to comply. But with districts across Oregon facing major budget shortfalls due to the poor economy, removing the pressure of this audit would be very welcome."

Comments

turn the tables!

[macsox]

linus should send a letter to microsoft in redmond demanding to see windows and ie code to make sure they're not illicitly using gpl'd code, and to provide documentation that they are not. that would be a funny thing.

Half the cost?

[Zeinfeld]

How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?

There is an advantage to teaching kids on multiple operating systems. However Unix is not at all suitable for general introductory courses. If you have highly motivated and intelligent kids they could probably learn on anything, including JCL. But most kids are not in that category (just as well or else our skills would not be in the same demand).

I suspect that this is simply a guy who wants to wage religious war rather than someone who wants to do the right thing for the kids. He will be lauded on slashdot but how much will the kids learn? Will they look at the csh command structure and conclude that computers are very hard to use, mysterious and probably deliberately so and resist using them? I suspect so.

US education is too full of people persuing their own agendas at the expense of the kids. The creationists want to ram their religious propaganda down everyone's craw. There are quack educational theories calling themselves liberal and even more quackish ones calling themselves traditional. In some parts of the US recess has been abolished - ignoring several centuries of experience and all psychological studies that show that kids have a limited attention span and will learn more with regular breaks.

When I started with computers the machines were much less powerful than anything in use today. But the big advantage of learning on an 8K PET computer is that you could quickly get the feeling that you understood how it worked. That is not true of Linux or Windows which are both overly complex.